Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord

The centrality of the King James Bible to early modern culture has been widely recognized. Yet for all the vast literature devoted to the masterpiece, little attention has been paid either to the scholarly scaffolding of the translation or to the erudition of the translators. The present volume seeks to redress this neglect by focusing attention on seven key translators as well as on their intellectual milieu. Utilizing a wide range of hitherto unknown or overlooked sources, the volume furnishes not only precious new information regarding the composition and early reception of the King James Bible, but firmly situates the labours of the translators within the broad context of early modern biblical and oriental scholarship and polemics.

Biographical note

Mordechai Feingold, D. Phil. (1980), is Professor of History at Caltech. His recent publications include Newton and the Origin of Civilization (Princeton, 2013), written with Jed Buchwald, and Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2017), edited with Elizabethanne Boran.

Readership

All interested in early modern intellectual history, history of religion, history of scholarship, book history, Biblical studies, translation studies, and Christian Hebraism.

Table of contents

1 Birth and Early Reception of a Masterpiece: Some Loose Ends and Common MisconceptionsMordechai Feingold

A collection of essays by an international team of scholars, Archival Afterlives explores the posthumous fortunes of scientific and medical archives in early modern Britain. It demonstrates the sustaining importance of archival institutions in the growth of the “New Sciences.”

The Lynx and the Telescope challenges the traditional interpretation of a programmatic convergence between the visions of Galileo and Cesi’s Academy, while offering a new interpretation of the dynamics that led to the condemnation of Galileo in 1633.

Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe investigates how, when, where and why Newton’s Principia was interpreted by readers in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England and Ireland. University textbooks and popular simplified vernacular texts created new audiences for early modern science.

Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin in collaboration with Karin Friedrich, University of Aberdeen

This collective volume in the history of early-modern science and medicine investigates the transfer of knowledge between Germany and Scotland focusing on the Scottish mathematician and physician Duncan Liddel of Aberdeen.

Richard ‘Dutch’ Thomson, best known today as a Bible translator and one of the earliest English Arminians, was admired by his contemporaries for his learning. This book provides the first biography of Thomson, and edits his surviving correspondence, seventy-eight letters.

Making the New World Their Own offers a systematic study of how Chinese scholars came to understand that the earth is shaped as a globe. This notion arose from their encounters with the Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century.

Richard Bellon’s A Sincere and Teachable Heart: Self-Denying Virtue in British Intellectual Life, 1736-1859 analyzes how principles of conduct and duty grounded in self-discipline pervasively influenced British intellectual life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Through various case studies, this book shows the continuity of the close relationship between jubilees and university historiography and the impact of this interaction on the jubilee publications and academic heritage. Yet it also goes beyond the jubilee by presenting three other ways of writing...